


Proportion in Bliss

by meek-bookworm (readertorider)



Category: Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter
Genre: Gen, Inspired by The Rigel Black Chronicles, Shippy Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27559822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readertorider/pseuds/meek-bookworm
Summary: Rigel's 5th year at Hogwarts is so far completely perfect. Except, of course, for how she's concealing a major secret from her friends, sidelined from the dueling field, and one chance meeting away from consigning herself to Azkaban.
Relationships: Harry & Leo
Comments: 32
Kudos: 92
Collections: Rigel Black Exchange Round 2





	Proportion in Bliss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Astra_Across_the_Stars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astra_Across_the_Stars/gifts).



As far as Rigel was concerned, fifth year was shaping up to be her best Hogwarts year yet. Classes were going well (having most of the fundamentals down meant she could now focus on the more obscure--and potentially potions related--implications), her prefect rounds were arranged to not interfere with her _two_ free-brewing nights a week, and her extra-curricular Fade research with Hermione and now Zhou was proceeding apace. 

And Riddle was busy chasing his construct to Antarctica, where by all accounts the construct, accompanied by a bunch of followers, a few trained ice dragons, and a stolen ever-burning flame, was either setting up its perfect society or mining for yet another magically powerful stone. Rigel rather hoped the native creatures got the lot of them, but her luck was never that good.

At the moment, however, Rigel was as free as any other student with an Azkaban-worthy secret. So when Draco and Pansy made the argument that she was bound by the bonds of friendship and her duty as prefect into coming to Hogsmeade with them she saw no harm in accepting.

The day itself started innocuously enough. Her solitary dawn laps around the lake, mist still clinging to the quiet waters and her boots damp with frost, melted into a jog with Draco and Pansy, and then the dueling club itself, back in the open now that the tournament was over.

It was strange to watch the first and second years, clustered together in small groups, many jumping and pointing when one of the squid’s tentacles broke the surface of the water. Two of the boys seemed to be sharing a set of mittens between them, an orange knitted creation on each of their wand hands, their other hand hidden deep in their robes. She didn’t think she had ever felt that young, but she could remember winding her own scarf around Draco’s neck in the Owlery, jamming her mittens onto his frozen fingers. So much had happened since then.

Draco split the first years off to sit on a hastily-conjured blanket, assigning Rigel to talk them through the tactics and follies of the advanced group as they worked through their own bouts. The tournament had not made Rigel any fonder of watching duels instead of participating in them, but there was something comfortable about talking to students who looked at her with only the same awe and respect that they gave to Draco and Pansy and any of the other upper years—which in some cases, admittedly, was very little. 

After the dragon and werewolf in the first task, most parents had not allowed their younger children to watch the tournament. And if the Chudley Canons kept up their implausible undefeated streak—the last game ended with the seeker disentangling the snitch from their keeper’s long hair-she had hopes that the whole last year would fade from the collective unconsciousness altogether. Draco was helping her by giving her a place out of the limelight, and it wasn’t like anyone sane wanted the first years pointing wands at each other before they had even mastered a basic levitation spell. 

There was a part of her, however, not so very deep down, that had her fingers itching for her wand. She and Archie had been dragooned into the world tour and while it had admittedly been fun—especially after Riddle abandoned them in order to go haring off after his slightly more insane counterpart—an accomplished duelist her cousin was not.

Pansy finished off McLaggen by conjuring a cloud of bubbles, shooting a muting spell and then an expelliarmus straight into the middle of them. The contrast between McLaggen on the ground covered in suds, face turning steadily redder as his mouth opened and closed noiselessly, and Pansy standing there, immaculate, not a hair out of place in her elaborate braids, was enough to set the first years giggling. Rigel grinned. Her charges would hopefully remember that when presented with a vision-obscuring but otherwise penetrable obstacle, they should not wait patiently in the middle of it for their opponents’ spells to find them.

Only she and Draco could likely tell how just how annoyed Pansy was, however, and since he was fully occupied by Cedric, Rigel unfolded herself.

A cork from her pocket and two hasty arrays later, and she had a yellow rose with a delicate tracery of veins shading to red at the center. In two strides she was at her friend’s side, watching McLaggen stomp off towards Zhou. “That was a beautiful display of temper there, Pans.”

“McLaggen knows he doesn’t belong in the advanced group. I told him. Drake told him. Even Ron, Morgana above, has mentioned it a dozen times if he said it at all.” Pansy took the rose, breathed deeply, and made a face. “Why does this smell like pickled salamander?”

Rigel took the flower back. A transfigured rose made with the usual spell wouldn’t smell at all, but Dumbledore had been teaching her biseiric arrays as a prelude to the even more difficult array matrices. If the magic consumption wasn’t perfectly balanced between both array paths, the magic would ignore the higher energy path, and her magic was particularly clever about finding small differences. A quick glance to the symbols burned into the grass confirmed she had undersized the blocking runes in the main transfiguration chain which left her magic completely free to ignore the secondary path that altered the smell.

“I didn’t compensate for Helmont’s olfactory shift when calculating the complexity coefficient for the second array. Let me have a minute though and I can reverse the initial transformation and do it properly this time.” Rigel turned to head down to the lake where the mud would make a much better impromptu writing surface than the grass, but Pansy stopped her with a light hand on her arm.

“Don’t do that, Rye.” Pansy reclaimed the rose from Rigel and waved her wand in a complicated pattern over the top of the flower. “It really is quite lovely and I could hardly be a credit to my mother if I couldn’t manage a simple odor canceling charm by now.” 

“Besides,” she added impishly, weaving the stem into one of the braids crowning her head, “once my charm wears off, I’ll treasure the permanent reminder of you. They do say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory.”

Rigel clapped both hands over her heart. “Are you saying I smell like I crawled out of a potions bottle, Pans?”

“I don’t think you seriously want us to answer that, Rye,” Draco cut in. Sweat had darkened his hair, but he was smirking, so he must have won his bout with Diggory. “Is there a reason you’re here giving Pansy favors instead of focusing on the poor helpless firsties?”

“Give Pansy a better opponent and I’ll have more to talk to them about.”

Draco frowned. “Fine. Pans, you can have Ron next round.”

“Thank you, Dray. I shall annihilate him.” Pansy pressed a kiss to Draco’s cheek, before turning towards a distinctive head of red hair. Her eagerness was palpable as she glided over and the other club members scattered before her like knarls faced with a graphorn. Ron seemingly didn’t notice everyone around him backing away, but his whole face lit up when he turned to see Pansy. Gryffindors had no sense of self-preservation. 

“Do you reckon—” Draco broke off at Rigel’s inquiring eyebrow. “Never mind. You’re hopeless. Go back to your firsties—if you and nearly a dozen underage witnesses don’t force them to have a clean match nothing will.”

That meant it probably had something to do with romance, and Rigel fought down a prickle of hurt. With Pansy’s now pristine occulamancy shields and Ron twenty yards away and surrounded by a knot of other students, Draco couldn’t be working off anything other than observation and instinct, but he did have years of training with his gift. It was a bit unfair to expect Rigel to be as good at picking these sorts of things out when her only observational experience involved Archie’s affection for Hermione which wasn’t exactly covert. She simply didn’t have the same interest (nosiness) in others’ interpersonal relationships that Draco and Pansy did.

But she could put his instincts to good use, and there was one interpersonal issue Draco could hopefully fix for her. “I miss a challenging duel too, you know.”

Draco checked over the club—most of the advanced duels were still in progress with Cedric and a couple of the other early finishers wandering over to help coach the beginner group on their shielding charms. He appeared to decide things were safe enough for now and flopped gracefully down onto the grass, casting an easy muffliato around the two of them when she sat down as well. “I know, Rye. But especially after the last task you seemed to want everyone to forget the tournament. Some of what you did in the third task you probably shouldn’t want people to remember.”

Rigel opened her mouth to protest, but Draco raised a hand and she waited. “I know you were justified and Owens was a right bastard and deserved so much worse than what he got. But rune work with blood, Rigel? _I_ didn’t know that was possible, and it scared me. It scared a lot of other people too.”

She twisted three strands of grass together into a loose braid, before undoing it and carding her fingers back through until they stood fully upright again. “You were always the one telling me not to be afraid, Drake. That my power was an amazing gift that I should use to its fullest extent—” she smiled “—and that anyone who feared me deserved it for being a brainless ninny.”

Draco laughed. “I wouldn’t say I completely disagree with my past self. But first and second years _are_ brainless ninnies. A certain amount of tact is required if you don’t like having them squeak every time you sneak up behind them.”

“And to think some people wondered why you weren’t made a prefect.”

A miss-aimed stupify singed the grass a few feet away, but Draco merely leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “If you recall, our head of house who hand picks the prefects considers a reasonable estimation of student intelligence a good thing. If you know they’re going to try to blow themselves up, or dive their broom into the ground, or sneak into the forest at every available opportunity, you can plan for it.” 

Rigel flicked her fingers and summoned a Fortis shield in front of a small knot of first years who had turned away from the duels in favor of chatting with each other and missed the jet of orange light that had been deflected away from its original target and was now corkscrewing towards them. The jinx was absorbed into the shield in a wash of opalescent color, the younger students hurriedly repositioning themselves so they _didn’t_ have their backs toward the source of stray spells.

“See this is what I mean, Rye. You’re cosseting them. Weasley Twin One shot that spell, so at the worst it’s a babbling hex or a two-step jinx or something equally silly. If you let it hit they would remember a dueling field is a terrible place for a gossip session, and Pomfrey would have them fixed up in less time than it took to walk to the Hospital wing.”

“It was George and they would think they’re a rabbit for the next three hours.”

Draco made a gesture that adequately conveyed he would be rolling his eyes or something equally uncouth if he were less well-bred.

Rigel rolled her own eyes. ”Do you want to chase a first year up to the Hospital Wing while they run through all the active duels, add on who knows how many hexes all of which are undoubtedly going to interact in strange and mysterious ways, and fish them out of anywhere that looks vaguely like a burrow on the way?”

“I want to tell _George_ to do it and watch as he deals with the consequences of his actions for once.”

“So what you’re telling me is that I should let the first years get injured because it’s good for them, and shouldn’t use magic around them because it will scare them? They’re not scared of Professor Dumbledore and everyone knows he defeated Grindelwald.”

“Rye, if you start wearing purple and sprouting words like ‘oddment’ and ‘tweak’, Pansy and I will disavow you.” Draco sounded completely serious and Rigel wiggled her toes comfortingly in her boots. Her friends did have strong opinions on fashion, but as long as her boots were grandfathered in, she supposed she could humor them.

“Surely there’s a middle ground though? If I keep using my magic as I wish people are bound to acclimate eventually.” Rigel ran a hand through her hair—one of her father’s gestures she probably needed to stop--and looked out over the lake. “I’m so tired of hiding, Dray.”

Draco’s hand twitched as if he wanted to touch her, but he held himself back and even as Rigel wished for the contact, she knew she couldn’t allow it. She had needed to resort to a couple of glamour spells this year even with her loose running clothes and tightly wrapped chest, and her spells only affected vision, not feeling. Even the Weasley Twins were keeping a respectful distance once she instinctively threw a Fortis around herself in the entrance hall when they came to give her their usual hair ruffle and half hug. After a summer spent with Archie tugging her by the hand or draping himself over her shoulders or resting his chin on her thigh in fox form as she read, her nerves ached with the sudden lack of touch.

“There is a middle ground, Rye. And I promise that between you, Pansy, and I we will find it. Slytherin won’t desert you—at this point practically everyone in the house owes you a debt of some sort and we pay our debts.” Draco’s voice was firm, his eyes gleaming silver in the sunlight, and Rigel felt herself caught up in his unshakable certainty.

Slytherin House’s support almost certainly wouldn’t last past a revelation of even some of her lies, but she shook the maudlin thought away. For now it might be enough that Rigel could show Hogwarts a little more of who she was. “As long as your middle ground doesn’t involve spreading ridiculous rumors, I like you better than my current PR team already.”

Draco smirked in a frankly worrying way. “You know I even heard one the other day about a baby runespoor trapped up a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

The ground was very hard when Rigel dropped her head back into it. “Surprisingly enough runespoor can climb—it’s why when you need to harvest shed skin you start looking at old oaks first. The rough texture of the bark helps them scrape it all off, and the pieces that end up in birds’ nests are generally the best preserved.”

Draco rolled up on his elbows to look her full in the face. “Just how much of that story is true?”

Rigel discovered an urgent need to check on the club, but unfortunately no one had partially transfigured themselves into a potted plant or started any duels of honor. 

“Guess that’s my answer, then.” Amusement tinted Draco’s voice. “Pans and I would be willing to advise you better than the twin menaces, if you’re willing to listen to us.”

“And what would my advisers advise about finally being able to duel?”

“Not before next week—I need to come up with something spectacular to challenge the Triwizard Champion.”

Rigel rolled her eyes and walked back to her firsties. The advanced duels had wound down so they didn’t need her quite yet, but she could use the time to compose her apothecary list for later. She was running low on doxy eggs.

-

Seven hours later, apothecary purchases in hand (there had been a _very_ nice sale on pennywort), Rigel followed Draco and Pansy into the Three Broomsticks. It was late enough in the day that the inundation of students had mostly passed and the pub was bustling but not crowded enough that they had any trouble spotting Millie and Blaise at a table by one of the windows.

Draco peeled off to join their friends while Pansy and Rigel made their way up to the bar to order. A redheaded man with protruding ears was flirting with the barmaid as she packed up enough crates of whiskey and ale to get half the alleys drunk twice over. Rigel hoped for his sake that he had also picked up an equally generous supply of hangover potion and sobering draught, although she supposed it could also be possible that he was an Abraxan rancher with particularly picky charges.

She was just examining his boots for any sign of mud or straw when the boots themselves started coming closer and she was forced to look up as he passed by. Their eyes met for an instant—very familiar hazel eyes in a well disguised, but recognizable, though inscrutable face-and Rigel could feel herself tensing up completely before Leo tipped his rancher’s hat at her and was gone, a half-dozen crates of alcohol following him out the door.

Leo knew now. There was no way he didn’t know between the Hogwarts uniform and how he always seemed to recognize her magic. If she had only lingered an extra minute or two over that batch of shriveled figs or agreed when Draco suggested chocolate first and drinks later, her and Archie’s secrets would be completely preserved. Now not even a time-turner could fix things.

Oblivate could work, however. It was such a small thing, only a few seconds that Leo would lose, and in return he wouldn’t be made into a target if she was found out and the Ministry enacted its retribution. With Dom’s help there would only be slight risk of dangerous side effects. Rigel imagined herself tearing off after Leo, wand in hand—alcohol responded poorly to apparition so he would still be in the area-and discarded the idea. It would be impractical to confront him in the middle of Hogsmeade, wearing her easily identified Hogwarts uniform and prefect badge when there were plenty of witnesses around. Never mind that the Rogue of the Lower Alleys wouldn’t capitulate easily.

Also she wasn’t sure she was willing to betray him like that, not even if it could save him from the Ministry later. Trust in the Lower Alleys meant more than coin or magic or blood, easily split or never there to begin with, and while Leo would not remember if all went well, Harry would know what it felt like to raise her wand against her friend.

There was still time to rush after him, to explain, if not to fight, but what could she say? Every time she tried to think of a believable story it felt like the cogs in her head were spinning without catching. She could see no plausible explanation besides the truth. A truth which slotted so neatly into all of her odd behavior in the alleys.

Rigel forced her thoughts to slow. The Rogue had a mantra, Aled had explained once, that once a plan was spoiled or a scouting expedition turned up something unexpected, you retreated and regrouped. Leo was in disguise for some reason, a disguise which was unlikely to hold up to much scrutiny if she drew attention to him. Dashing off after him would definitely draw attention to them both, and she did not particularly want to lie (more) to Pansy and her other friends on top of everything else.

Leo needed to dispose of his shopping. They both needed to sit down, to think, to plan. Perhaps he (unlikely) would decide it was all just mistaken identity, brought on by Butterbeer fumes. Perhaps she could come up with an appropriate story with a few hours to think on things. Perhaps Archie would have some ideas. Perhaps—

“Rigel, did you know him?” Pansy had placed a hand on her arm, her lips a gentle moue of concern. 

Rigel forced herself to smile lightly back at her. “My apologies, Pans. His boots just reminded me of the brewing I wanted to get done tonight and I was woolgathering.”

Pansy held her eyes for a long moment, and Rigel could not tell if she believed her or not. All Rigel could do was paste on her best potions-obsessed expression ( _not_ the guilelessness which was a surefire tell with both Sirius and Archie) and hope. Just before Rigel’s eyes started to itch from dryness, Pansy squeezed her arm and removed her hand. “Pity. I was hoping you could introduce us. Now that the unicorns have moved on, it would be nice to have an Abraxan or two around the manor.”

That was a definite out, and Rigel didn’t even mind when Pansy left her with all the drinks and the bill. 

Pansy was willing to let this mystery go for the moment. Now all Rigel needed to do was figure out a story Leo would believe. Archie was inventive. He could make himself useful and between the two of them they would come up with something. 

-

Archie had not proved helpful. He had brought in Hermione to consult since “she knows the bloke and you only let me meet him officially once” and watching the mirror tilt crazily as they both launched into more and more emphatic gestures had not promoted the inner peace of either her mind or her stomach.

Never mind that they both failed to see the problem in the first place. Of course Leo wasn’t going to go to the Ministry or Dumbledore, or let anything odd slip to his father. But Leo already had so many responsibilities and Harry wouldn’t force him to keep another of her secrets, a secret that could so easily send him to Azkaban and plunge the alleys into chaos. 

And at its heart, the ruse wasn’t exactly a noble thing. Sure, Rigel had accomplished things to benefit the wizarding world—that cache of basilisk parts had already resulted in several papers and had definitely energized the potions community—but at its heart the ruse was a tangle of selfish desire, potent curiosity, and two eleven-year-olds’ refusal to accept that the world wasn’t fair.

Harry was not sure what, if any, theories Leo had created to explain her odd behavior, but almost certainly they painted her in a better light than the truth—building up friendships and mentorships and a whole wall of lies, knowing that in a little over two years she would be smashing everything to smithereens. Her relationship with Leo was supposed to be safe from that fallout, but now he was caught in the middle of it and the only way to set him free would be by spinning a whole new set of lies.

Harry tipped her quill so the bead of ink would not fall on the fresh sheet of parchment and frowned down at the now blank and silent mirror. Her lab was still and quiet apart from the amortentia bubbling away in the corner, too early yet for it to have developed a smell. Archie and Hermione would back whatever story she came up with, if only she could come up with it.

Two hours later she scattered sand across her letter, finished if not fully satisfied. Archie’s (frankly embarrassing) crush on Hermione had inspired a tale of closely guarded romance and teenagers unbearably separated first by Riddle’s world tour and then by the distance of some three thousand miles. She had invented long broom flights in the pouring rain, international portkey hijinks, and hastily brewed polyjuice to bring the cruelly separated lovebirds together once a month. Once a month and only on the weekend when students had no classes and no restriction to stay on school grounds. When they were, potentially and with the right lawyer, not students for purposes of the Ministry’s law on blood identity theft.

She was not sure if the technicality would be enough, but Leo had recognized Harry in Rigel’s Hogwarts robes and Prefect badge, standing with Pansy Parkinson. Short of memory spells or more insidious magic that Dom would likely only be too happy to explain in great detail, she couldn’t change that fact. But she could try and mitigate the damage. Hopefully the ambiguity would be enough to keep the Ministry from prosecuting him if it all came out. 

And if she and Archie did enact their fall-back plan, sending Rigel back to his mysterious origins on the Continent, Harry had only to layer on a new set of lies, that of course she had been briefly covering for Rigel. It was much more practical for her to do it than Archie, since she was merely across the country while Archie was at AIM.

It was a good story, well-supported by the thick missives she and Hermione were sending back and forth (their fade research could look like love letters if no one opened them), but it was still only a story, and she was breaking the detente they had established years ago in her flat. That careful arrangement where she would not lie and Leo would not pry became meaningless as soon as she posted the letter.

But to do otherwise would land Leo in a cell next to her own in Azkaban if she was revealed. And Leo absolutely did not deserve to be brought down with her. He had nothing to do with the Ministry’s blood purity laws, had likely never even set foot within Hogwarts—

Rigel tossed the letter into the fire under her simmering cauldron and shoved the mirror back into her bag before turning and leveling her wand at the door. She could hear the tiny clicks of lock tumblers engaging and disengaging, which meant someone had bypassed the initial alarm ward, the barrier ward, the subtle ward that would summon Professor Snape, and the multiple jinxes on the doorknob, leaving only the physical protection of the locked door. And even as she watched, the thief—for who else would be trying to get into her potions lab at this time in the evening?-succeeded in picking the lock and dislodged the latch slightly from its moorings.

The door swung slowly open under its own weight, and if Rigel did not remember carefully locking the door when she first entered the lab and then listening as the lock was picked, she might have thought the door had just become dislodged in one of the occasional breezes the castle liked to amuse itself with. But the lock was picked, the wards were down, and Peeves did not ordinarily bother himself with doors at all.

The door was gaping enough now that Rigel could see the darkness of the hallway beyond, the nearest torches apparently extinguished. She shot a stunner into the dark, but the red light inexplicably vanished as soon as it passed through the doorway. 

Rigel pictured the torch scones in the hallway outside and asked her magic to help. A wave of light swept down the corridor—her magic was perhaps a little over enthusiastic—and Harry instinctively threw up a Fortis shield as she was left blinking in the aftermath. 

When her vision cleared, Leo was standing in the doorway, disguise gone, his wand pointed at the ground. 

They stared at each other for a moment before Leo waved his wand in a complicated pattern and privacy wards rose around them.

Rigel reached over to right her stool from where the Fortis shield had pushed it over, combing her hair back with one hand. Unless she wanted to knock him out, oblivate him, and somehow smuggle him out of the castle while unconscious (and she didn’t), her options were limited. “You’re not supposed to be here.” 

“It’s a school Harry, hardly an impenetrable fortress.” Rigel couldn’t miss the stress on her name, or the tension in the way he leaned back against the wall. Perhaps he was as worried about this as she had been.

A quick request of her magic, and her second lab stool tottered over, nudging against Leo’s thigh. The corner of his mouth twitched up as he looked between her and the stool before brushing off the top and seating himself.

With Leo here in front of her, she couldn’t exchange the truth for the paltry protection her planned lies would provide. The words almost seemed to slide out, simple, and natural, and true. “When I was eleven it seemed like a fortress. Mysterious and forbidden, but my cousin had a key that he didn’t want.”

“And Hogwarts had Snape, one of the finest Potions Master in half a century.” Leo tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, the tone of his voice a perfect match for the one he used when Cora explained about the fire juggling or Gavril caught Jack climbing into the coven’s second story window. Harry supposed she should feel a bit defensive, but on the whole she had that same exasperated fondness for her past self. “I take it Archie wanted to be a healer?”

“Ever since his Mum died,” Harry confirmed, slightly surprised that Leo remembered Archie’s name after only meeting him a couple of times in passing. “It seemed so perfect when we were children—I wanted to study potions, but couldn’t study under Snape because of unfair laws. Archie wanted to study healing, but his Dad was terrified he would lose him like Diana, and trusted only Dumbledore to look after him.”

She paused, remembering the day they made that final decision, Archie bursting into her room to throw himself across her bed. “It was simple really—we staged dramatic haircuts, acquired two sets of colored contacts, bribed the family owls, and nicked a bit of my father’s polyjuice for the day of. Only one person outside the family really knew what we looked like, and we came to an arrangement soon enough.”

Leo had moved a little when she mentioned the “arrangement”, but seemed to decide to let it go for now. “It didn’t stay simple.”

“No.” And she told him, everything spilling out in a torrent. From her sorting to her imprisonment in the Forbidden Forest, to Hermione’s own realization of their identities after reading about the first aid kit (something her Harry definitely would’ve shared with her) and what actually happened in the final task. Harry touched lightly in some places, glossing over Merriam and her full arrangement with Flint or the true identity of the construct which her vow prevented her from revealing, but it was still much more of the truth than she had ever told anyone except Archie before.

And if she found a way to wiggle around her vow (perhaps _Archie_ could be the one to explain?), or if Merriam or Flint needed more help, she could always tell him later. That was a heady realization. She was not quite sure yet how Leo felt about the ruse as a whole, but even as she wound her story down he was still here, perched on the stool and asking insightful questions. The undefinable condition when all her lies ran out was starting to feel more and more like a simple removable discontinuity with their friendship stretching into the future on the other side.

“I don’t know that I would do everything over again knowing what I do now,” Harry said thoughtfully, when her story reached the present. “Riddle kept escalating every time one of his plans failed—if Archie was one of the first people to fall sick, Sirius consulting with healers everywhere would have provided all the publicity Riddle would have wanted, and people would be alive now who currently aren’t.”

“Or Lee Jordon could have smothered Archie in his sleep, Riddle unleashes the sickness without knowing a cure, and several grades of school children are kept in perpetual comas for years if not decades.” Leo stretched and came over lean against her brewing table, looking her straight in the eye. “Riddle wants you to take responsibility for his actions because then he can manipulate you easier, but the world doesn’t work that way.”

Harry nodded. It was close enough to Archie’s feelings on the subject, and considering they both tended to take on more responsibility than they strictly needed to—Leo for the alleys and Archie for his patients—it did comfort her a bit. 

“Although you have gotten yourself into a right mess.” Leo crossed his arms. “How are you planning on ending this?”

She told him about her French lessons, and Rigel’s potential identity as a third person while Harry studied in her Lower Alleys flat. She also told him about her secondary plans of faking a pregnancy or an obscure disease, just to see him laugh.

“Might want to start manufacturing sightings with three people now, too,” Leo said, thoughtfully. “Have Rigel go to a quidditch game with his pals and get photographed, while Harry has a brewing session with Master Snape—the Guild maintains records of who uses which practice rooms and they never throw anything out—all while Archie keeps perfect attendance at his classes. Nobody seems to talk to AIM at the moment, but if you can get at least a couple of casual records where Harry, Rigel, and Archie are all accounted for, it should help support your story later.” 

“Are you volunteering?” She made a show of looking him up and down, tilting her head to the side with her lips pressed together as if she were hiding disappointment. “I’m not sure you have quite the flair to be the winner of the Triwizard Tournament, most promising Heir in Britain.”

Leo hopped up to sit on her lab table. “It is true. My innate honesty and law abiding nature might even shine through polyjuice.”

He started to hang his head in mock dejection, and Harry pushed him off her (formerly) nice clean table. Leo ruffled her hair as he came down, so she poked him in the stomach in retaliation.

Just as she ducked his half-hug (or grip for another hair ruffle), Harry grinned. “Leo, fancy a duel?” 

-

Leo just barely fit under her invisibility cloak, so she could sometimes catch glimpses of the edges of his boots as they made their way through the dark and mostly silent castle. With the secret passages, there wouldn’t be much opportunity for the portraits or ghosts to notice the cloak’s occasional failures, although she couldn’t help a brief detour to the kitchens—she had missed dinner.

Binny looked a bit disapproving as she packed up a small basket, her eyes flickering to where Leo was standing. Rigel couldn’t tell if Binny had seen the cloak twitch, or if house elves had a natural sense for people, but she told her that he was a friend she hadn’t seen in almost a year and would be gone by morning. Binny’s eyes softened and she added a few more fresh cookies to the top of the pile. “Friends of Rigel are friends of Binny.”

She thanked the elf and they wound their way up to the seventh floor. It was a frankly terrible tour of Hogwarts—all narrow passage ways behind tapestries or climbing through statues, no glimpse of Great Hall’s ceiling or opportunity to ride a moving staircase—but Binny was worth more than a thousand staircases, and she would wager all the galleons in her possession that Leo had never seen anything like the Come and Go Room before.

They were silent since it was after curfew and Peeves tended to hear quiet muttering even better than normal conversation, but Harry was fully occupied with her magical sense, sending it out in waves and listening as it came back to her again, suffused with information. 

There was Leo’s magic behind her, washing over the walls and peering into the gaps between stone and painting or the shadowed eyes of a knight’s helm before dashing back and twining around him. There was the magic of the paintings, banked in sleep, bright points of ghosts drifting casually through walls, and a background hum of Hogwarts itself, not fully aware, but still present. 

She pulled them both into the alcove behind the painting of the drunken monks when she felt the blaze of Dumbledore’s magic, hoping that the boisterous revelers and their guests would be enough to hide their presence. Leo’s arm was warm but tense about her shoulders as Dumbledore paused in front of them, but eventually he moved on, and Harry caught a glimpse of him in a purple bathrobe and stocking cap with a huge mug of hot chocolate before he turned the corner.

The Come and Go Room unfolded from nothing in a conflagration of magic, and Harry couldn’t help stepping back and checking that it hadn’t alerted the whole castle. Leo had come closer when she startled, but she flashed him the ‘OK’ sign and strode over to the door. One of these days she would probe deeper into the room’s secrets, but not tonight. Tonight she had _plans_.

She had intentionally left her conception of the room vague, to give it space to fill in its own ideas, and the room did not disappoint. There was a huge open space in the center with weapons arrayed along the walls and the surfaces not covered by staves (or knives or maces or dozens of other things she could not name) were coated in mirrors. As she walked into the room, she could feel the floor give slightly under her feet—easier on the joints and probably wouldn’t hurt too much if a stunner connected and they went crashing down.

“What is this place?” Leo had wandered over to a wall of daggers—straight bladed and curved, serrated knives and stilettos, some dripping with gilt work and others that seemed almost to absorb light.

“I’m not entirely sure. The elves call it the ‘Come and Go Room’ and say everything lost or hidden in the castle has been making its way here for centuries. It made this particular room because I asked for it, but it changes depending on the needs of the asker.”

Harry shed her robe and began stretching, the embroidered sunflowers on Archie’s light blue shirt (she would never understand her cousin’s sense of style) spinning and regrouping in time with her movements.

Then they were facing each other from a dozen paces apart, blunted knives in their left hands, wands in their right.

Harry moved first, firing a barrage of stunning spells and tickling jinxes which looked about the same, but moved at slightly different speeds, enough of a difference that it might confuse Leo’s sense of timing. 

Leo flipped away from all of her spells, however, and fired three of his own—blue bursts of light that she did not recognize and therefore did not want to risk shielding. She dove and rolled under the nearest, angling back a bit to maintain distance. Harry enjoyed their knife fights, but she also wanted to win and Leo’s strength, reach, and experience meant she wanted to avoid closing in for now.

She stayed in a crouch when she finished tumbling, conjuring a dozen balls about the size of oranges, sending the first to block the spell headed for her head, and three others zooming towards Leo to intercept his next spells. He had had time to do much more than prepare four spells, however, and she extended her magic sense to check for traps.

Unfortunately she had forgotten where she was—everything in the Come and Go Room was magic—and was briefly blinded as her sense overwhelmed her vision. She kept her balls circling her in a random pattern, but she could hear them bursting as they made contact with Leo’s spells, so she twisted and rolled in the opposite direction, trusting her memory of the room’s dimensions that she wasn’t backing herself into a corner.

It wasn’t a corner, but when she blinked her eyes open again, wincing against the pain, Leo was an arm’s length away and a petrification curse was approaching from another angle—likely reflected from one of the mirrors.

A deep breath and she was secure in her Fortis shield, the spell absorbing into the expanding shield without a flicker and Leo springing off of it to vault behind her. She dragged the shield around to face him, but even as she did so a white smoke began swirling throughout her little bubble, likely working its way in through the little cracks and crevices where the shield met the ground, the same way the air did. She had no desire to find out if the smoke merely obscured her vision or if it had some other sorts of nasty side effects.

“You’re getting predictable, Harry,” Leo teased. Harry ignored him, feeling down the connection her magic still maintained with the shield, and gathering all the strands up together like a net. A shallow breath later and she was tossing the whole thing over him, caught like an insect under a glass.

She didn’t want to hold the shield for long—the inverted shape was unnatural and required as many constant minute adjustments as any unstable free brew, so it was likely to collapse anyway—but she wanted enough time to put some distance between them. Even before she was three steps away, though, Leo had used his knife to cut through the the back in an easy swipe and was free again. She supposed the proliferation of her protection potion had made it only a matter of time before the criminal element had developed some way of dealing with the shield and Riddle’s arrows in the second task had certainly proven the shield was not impenetrable.

At any rate she probably couldn’t rely on the Fortis again, and Leo was quickly approaching. As she sprinted away she briefly considered a transformation into her raven form, but her flight was ungainly enough that he could likely still catch up to her by running, and the ceiling wasn’t high enough to give her enough time to dodge spells effectively. But against a stranger to the castle the room would probably be on her side. 

A quick request and a piece of chalk appeared in the air in front of her, and she snatched it up, turning her run into a diving tumble, to land in a crouch with her chalk poised over the pristine black floor. A handful of quick symbols and a chunk of imbued magic later and the expanse of floor between herself and Leo had become knee high tendrils of the same springy material, wrapping themselves tightly around his calves. 

Leo did something to pull quickly out of his boots, using the momentum from his own arrested sprint and a quickly conjured slab of glass to surf across the surface of her tendrils. That left his trajectory blindingly obvious, and Harry shot a tight mix of stunners and stinging hexes at him, banishing each for an even greater burst of speed. 

One of her stinging spells must have made contact, because she heard him hiss, but he had flipped sideways to avoid most of her spells and seemed to be coaxing the animating magic out of the tendrils, leaving them limp.

Harry had already had her next set of symbols sketched out, however, channeling her magic to turn the floor hidden beneath the tendrils liquid. Once he dropped into the now seemingly quiescent floor, she would have him.

As Leo descended towards her trap, he cast a summoning spell on the battle axes secured behind her head. She risked a glance behind her—surely he couldn’t think his spells could overpower the room’s protections?-only to find that instead of bringing the axes to Leo, the spell was bringing Leo to the axes, skimming him across the surface of her black marsh.

She fired petrification and imprisoning jinxes while he was making such a fine target of himself, but the summoning charm allowed him enough play to use a combination of propulsion spells and additional summoning spells to dodge. 

When Leo was almost on top of her, she released a net spell Dawlish had taught her, a carefully woven bit of magic that remained light and flexible, but would transfigure itself to steel as soon as it felt the warmth of body heat. She doubted his knife could cut through both a Fortis shield and steel—it wasn’t large enough to hold multiple enchantments without them interfering with each other and slicing through the strongest of the magical and mundane were too different to be covered by just one enchantment. 

The net followed Leo as he released the summoning charm and leapt up, tracking his movements perfectly, but he turned a somersault in midair and hit the net with a gentle warming charm. A tangle of steel wire plummeted into the marshy floor where it was consumed without a ripple.

Then Leo was coming down to her left, and Harry dropped her chalk to snatch up her knife, dancing back a few steps to where the floor was clear and unaltered.

She had forgotten how fast he was. Harry was no slouch, herself, but her instincts over the course of the last year had been wired towards free brews and the lashes of Riddle’s magic. Her knife skills had atrophied from lack of an opponent, and she could feel Leo holding back.

But she did not have the attention for minding anything except her blade and footwork at the moment. Her Fortis would prove little challenge for his knife, and while she could try summoning a Depasco Shield or throwing arresting magic at him like a cauldron on the brink of explosion, she very much preferred Leo with his heart beating and all his limbs attached. 

So she kept giving ground, focus narrowed to their knives and feet. She bent away from a high kick to stab at his torso, her arm jarring as he caught her blade against his. When she went to leap backwards again, however, she felt something solid against her foot, nowhere near the room’s boundaries. This then was what Leo had been doing in those spare moments at the beginning of their fight: an invisible wall.

Her back was against it now, and before she could reduce it to rubble Leo’s knife was resting, gleaming and cold, against her collarbone. 

“Yield, Harry?” His eyes were bright and she could feel the satisfaction rolling off of him. 

She grinned at him. “Not quite yet.” And then she asked the room for a waterfall. 

-

When the water had all drained into her marsh (she had no idea where that was going), and they had each made use of the (newly existent) changing room, picked over Binny’s slightly soggy basket of delights and fought the rematch and tiebreaker, Harry found herself curled up against Leo on a couch in the center of the floor, a fire crackling in front of them.

The Slytherin common room had likely emptied out by now, the early hours of the morning a perfect opportunity to sneak back in with few witnesses and time enough to catch a reasonable amount of sleep if she forewent her morning run. But Leo’s arm was warm about her shoulders and Harry did not want to leave.

“What were you doing in the Three Broomsticks earlier?” She was curious, and listening to the story was as good of an excuse as any to remain right where she was.

Leo laughed. “Do you know how hard it is to organize a surprise party for Solom? The man has more ears than I do, knows all the local distributors, and is even more suspicious than Ma. The Three Broomsticks was the farthest I could go without chartering a ship and leaving the country altogether, and I figured a Hogsmeade weekend would scare most of the locals inside.”

“You still need food and music and presents and all that though. Or is it not that kind of party?” She doubted the Lower Alleys celebrations followed the same pattern as her family’s child-friendly events, but she had an even more difficult time picturing Marek and Rispah at a Malfoy-style garden party, swanning around in sedate groups for the purpose of being seen.

“Nah. We’ll have music and dancing and drinking and darts and carousing and Gobstones and all that. Got a couple of local music groups lined up, made sure they have their stories straight. If anyone asks, there’s a festival over in Tuscany they’re going to that night—Aled drew up some very convincing flyers.”

Harry shook her head. The whole thing sounded like one of her father and Sirius’s over-elaborate plans, but she guessed it kept them out of worse trouble. 

They watched the fire in silence for a bit, before Leo’s arm loosened around her shoulders, giving her space if she wanted. “Harry, I know I have no right to lecture anyone on lying or dangerous choices, so I won’t, but have you thought about the future? What you honestly want to happen at the end of all this?”

She snuggled deeper into his side. “I know it’s impossible—even if the legal consequences weren’t there, I’ve broken my friends’ trust in so many different ways—but I want to stay both Rigel and Harry. I don’t want to give up Pansy or Draco or Millie or Blaise or Fred or George or Zhou or even Ron.”

“Are they really such good friends if you can’t imagine trusting them?”

Leo’s tone, curious and non-judgmental, kept the question from being rhetorical, but she could not help flaring up. “Is your father deserving of his title when you’ve been lying to him for years and created a completely fake job just to get him off your back?”

The arm around her shoulders tightened in apology and she felt her anger fade away. Archie didn’t understand her friendships either, but neither of them had seen Draco flying a whole quidditch practice upside-down to prove he could or Pansy poring over a cookbook as if it were an Arithmancy text. They had not seen how Draco and Pansy stuck by her when none of her spells worked or a good portion of the school thought she was a monster. Or how carefully they hovered after the traumatic events that littered her time at Hogwarts like toadstools along a Forbidden Forest path.

“I don’t want to make them choose.” That was the truth, but not quite all of it. “I’m terrified they won’t choose me, but I’m even more terrified they will because then everything is my responsibility. I don’t want to come between them and their families.” 

“So you are taking their choice away from them.”

“If the choices are between Scylla and Charybdis does that really matter?”

Leo made a thoughtful noise which vibrated through his chest. “Both the Malfoy and Parkinson Houses only have one heir. Lady Zabini dotes on her son over any of her stepchildren and the Bulstrodes have always leaned neutral. If Lord Black, a maverick with a perfectly respectable younger brother waiting in the wings, was allowed to inherit the title, I think your friends would have a reasonable chance of reconciliation.”

Sirius’s case was slightly complicated by the fact that even now the Blacks could not remove the infertility curse placed on Regulus, so any line of his issue was doomed to be a short one, but that was not her secret to tell. And Leo did have a point. Assuming that she and Hermione did not cure the fade in the next couple of years, her friends’ families had a strong incentive to rally around them instead of pushing them out.

And even if the very worst came to pass, and she was sent to Azkaban with her friends proven to have known the secret, their fine would be less than a year of Hogwarts tuition. It was a new way of looking at things, certainly, but she had been forced to reevaluate many things over the course of the ruse—her friendships, her magic, her sense of civil responsibility—was one more truly surprising?

“It doesn’t help with Master Snape,” Leo continued. “He can’t prove himself a pureblood any more than you can, and he’s required by the Guild to report any ‘deficiencies in moral character’ of his apprentices besides, but assuming someone spots the Weasleys the gold for a fine, your other Hogwarts friends should weather the fallout.”

Harry closed her eyes. “So just you, me, and Professor Snape in Azkaban. Sounds like a lovely party.”

When she opened them again, Leo was grinning down at her. ”Lass, do you really think even Azkaban could hold you, me, and your Professor Snape if someone had the bright decision to lock us in together?”

Harry recalled Professor Snape showing her the proper way to pick open the wards on a locked puzzle box, her own magic’s eagerness to do the seemingly impossible just because she asked it, and Leo’s seemingly effortless entry into one of the oldest and well-maintained castles in Britain. “No, I suppose not.”

It was a disturbing thought. For all her lawbreaking she did not feel like a criminal and breaking out of Azkaban was undoubtedly a criminal act. It did not feel right that her magic would allow her to escape the consequences of her actions. On the other hand, she still believed the laws were unjust, and was breaking out of Azkaban afterwards any different than making the choices that lead to her conviction in the first place? 

She resolved to think about it a bit more when her muscles weren’t aching and she wasn’t on the brink of dozing off against Leo’s shoulder. Her first goal had always been not to get caught, and that wouldn’t change. She had plenty of time later to consider the implications of staging the first Azkaban breakout. 

Evidently Leo’s steady breathing and the crackling of the fire did lull her to sleep, because the next thing she noticed was Leo slipping out from under her. 

He noticed her awareness. “It’s just before dawn and I know you promised Binny I’d be gone by morning.”

Harry smothered a yawn against her hand, looking around for her boots. “I’ll walk you out.”

Leo smiled at her. “I can find my own way, and besides you need your sleep.”

Harry flicked him on the shoulder for his hypocrisy and tossed the invisibility cloak over him for good measure. “It is my solemn duty as prefect not to let visitors roam the castle unescorted.”

Technically curfew didn’t apply to the very early hours of the morning, so she risked showing him the main hall of staircases. Gray light filtered in through the windows and most of the portraits were still slumbering as they made their way to the third floor.

Leo hesitated at the opening of the statue of the one-eyed witch, the invisibility cloak back in her possession and neatly folded in Binny’s basket. His eyes seemed to be memorizing her face and she wondered what she saw. Her hair was likely as messy as it ever was, face pale from lack of sleep with the blended features he would recognize as “Harry’s” and Rigel’s gray eyes.

It was not unlikely that the next time they saw each other one of them would be imprisoned behind Ministry wards, and she found herself memorizing his face as well, his eyes serious for once, jaw dotted with morning stubble. 

“Promise me,” Leo said, her name absent in the echoing corridor, but as present between them as her black Hogwarts robes. “Promise me that if you need help you will let me know.”

She ran her mind back along her adventures at Hogwarts. It had not seemed fair before to drag him into the kerfuffle over the Dominion Jewel or Riddle’s mess of political scheming, but now that her mistakes could get them both caught, his help really wasn't just for her anymore. “I promise. Will you do the same?”

He looked surprised for a moment, before he recovered and grinned at her. “Wild hippogriffs couldn’t keep me from writing you letters. Reckon you know more about my troubles than anyone else in the world.”

Harry dropped Binny’s basket against the wall and came forward to hug him, only letting go when the light started climbing up her boots. It would be too risky for him to visit again, but in a couple of months she would be back at Diagon. 

She smothered another yawn as Leo ducked into the one-eyed witch’s hump, the passageway closing up behind him. Leo would be missed, but in the meantime she had a new project to occupy herself with—figuring out just how to start laying the groundwork for telling Draco and Pansy her secret. Some friendships were worth risking Azkaban for.


End file.
